Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 13, 2025
In our day, the great playwright is more likely to be he who does not shrink, on occasion, from blotting an act or two. There is a modern French dramatist who writes, with success, such plays as I might have written had I combined a strong philosophical faculty with great rhetorical force and fluency. The dramas of M. Paul Hervieu have all the neatness and cogency of a geometrical demonstration.
And the same dilemma will present itself to any playwright who seeks to imitate M. Hervieu. The actual keeping of a secret, then the appeal to the primary curiosity of actual ignorance may be ruled out as practically impossible, and, when possible, unworthy of serious art.
There are not lacking signs of late that the drama is likely in the immediate future to assert a sharper rivalry with prose-fiction; and novelists like Sir James Barrie and the late Paul Hervieu have relinquished the easier narrative for the more difficult and more dangerous stage-play. But there is no evidence that the novel is soon to lose its vogue.
For abundant examples of scenes rendered obligatory by the logic of the theme, we have only to turn to the works of those remorseless dialecticians, MM. Hervieu and Brieux. In such a play as La Course du Flambeau, there is scarcely a scene that may not be called an obligatory deduction from the thesis duly enunciated, with no small parade of erudition, in the first ten minutes of the play. It is that, in handing on the vital lampada, as Plato and "le bon poète Lucrèce" express it, the love of the parent for the child becomes a devouring mania, to which everything else is sacrificed, while the love of the child for the parent is a tame and essentially selfish emotion, absolutely powerless when it comes into competition with the passions which are concerned with the transmission of the vital flame. This theorem having been stated, what is the first obligatory scene? Evidently one in which a mother shall refuse a second marriage, with a man whom she loves, because it would injure the prospects and wound the feelings of her adored daughter. Then, when the adored daughter herself marries, the mother must make every possible sacrifice for her, and the daughter must accept them all with indifference, as mere matters of course. But what is the final, triumphant proof of the theorem? Why, of course, the mother must kill her mother to save the daughter's life! And this ultra-obligatory scene M. Hervieu duly serves up to us. Marie-Jeanne (the daughter) is ordered to the Engadine; Sabine (the mother) is warned that Madame Fontenais (the grandmother) must not go to that altitude on pain of death; but, by a series of violently artificial devices, things are so arranged that Marie-Jeanne cannot go unless Madame Fontenais goes too; and Sabine, rather than endanger her daughter's recovery, does not hesitate to let her mother set forth, unwittingly, to her doom. In the last scene of all, Marie-Jeanne light-heartedly prepares to leave her mother and go off with her husband to the ends of the earth; Sabine learns that the man she loved and rejected for Marie-Jeanne's sake is for ever lost to her; and, to complete the demonstration, Madame Fontenais falls dead at her feet. These scenes are unmistakably scènes
One imagines that, for M. Hervieu, the act of composition means merely the careful filling in of a scenario as neat and complete as a schedule. But for that very reason, despite their undoubted intellectual power, M. Hervieu's dramas command our respect rather than our enthusiasm. The dramatist should aim at being logical without seeming so.
"Il y a longtemps que je cachais au fonds de mon coeur le désir de posséder votre portrait, qui, interressant pour le monde, est devenu précieux pour moi, puisque j'ai le plaisir de vous connaître telle que vous êtes, bonne, simple, bienveillante, et loin de tout ce qui effroie et eloigne des reputations litéraires. Je remercie M. Hervieu de Tavoir fait aussi ressemblant. Et je vous assure, chère Madame Trollope, que rien ne pouvait me toucher aussi vivement et me faire autant de plaisir que ce souvenir venant de vous, qui me rappelera sans cesse les bons moments que j'ai eu la satisfaction de passer avec vous et qui resteront
There is method in the madness, but it is a method of intangible ideas. 12mo. $1.50 net CONTENTS: Henrik Ibsen August Strindberg Henry Becque Gerhart Hauptmann Paul Hervieu The Quintessence of Shaw Maxim Gorky's Nachtasyl Hermann Sudennann Princess Mathilde's Play Duse and D'Annunzio Villiers de l'lsle Adam Maurice Maeterlinck.
There are not lacking signs of late that the drama is likely in the immediate future to assert a sharper rivalry with prose-fiction; and novelists like Mr. Barrie and M. Hervieu have relinquished the easier narrative for the more difficult and more dangerous stage-play. But there is no evidence that the novel is soon to lose its vogue.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking